


How Your Heart is Wired

by Siria



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Alternate Universe, Episode: s05e19 Vegas, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-13
Updated: 2009-12-13
Packaged: 2017-10-04 09:57:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John's memories were disjointed, dissociated.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How Your Heart is Wired

**Author's Note:**

> Set post episode 5.19, 'Vegas'; sequel to [heads, tails](http://siriaeve.livejournal.com/342952.html). A monstrously belated birthday present for Cate. Many thanks to Trin for finding grammar mistakes, and to Jenn for betaing!

John's memories were disjointed, dissociated: he remembered clearly the pain he'd felt in his chest each time he breathed; the press of the parched earth against his shoulder blades; how blue the desert sky had been overhead. He distinctly remembered thinking _so this is it, huh_, hearing the start of a rattle at the back of his throat, audible even over the roar of the flames and the distant sounds of a chopper's engines. Yet try as he might, he could never remember anything between the time when he closed his eyes against the Vegas sky and when he opened them again to blink up at the ceiling in his hospital room. He knew there must have been medics and military, oxygen masks and compressions; he knew McKay came with them, because when John came to later, McKay's hair had been mussed and there'd been blood smeared on his expensive dress shirt.

He knew what it must have been like because later—much later—in another bed on another world, thinking John was asleep, McKay had cupped the back of John's head in one blunt-fingered hand and murmured _you fucker, you—do you know what it was like to see you lying there, you **stupid** shit, you_… And John didn't know, had left the pieces of all of it strewn across the sands of the Nevada desert, but he didn't have to fight his way back there by himself—he'd been slowly learning that maybe it was okay to let someone else share the burden of memory.

***

Physio sucked. Physio always sucked, but for some reason this time it felt more difficult than it ever had before. John didn't know why. It wasn't like the therapists here were that much worse than they'd been in Landstuhl. No matter where you ended up, therapists were all sadistic sons of bitches with firm hands and a too-polite manner—John was pretty sure he hadn't been able to move his shoulder like that even before he got a bullet in it. Ligament and muscle protested, bone ached, and by the time he made it back to his room in the afternoons, John was always in a foul mood.

"Oh, please," McKay said on the fifth day, not bothering to look up from whatever he was reading. Usually it was an academic journal, or Sudoku, or densely packed print on something that looked like a flashier, more flexible version of a Kindle. Today it was a _National Geographic_ special issue about dinosaurs. "Stop being such a baby."

"Like you've had worse," John sniped, easing himself down onto his bed and trying to ignore how even that made him grunt and sweat. He had the feeling that he stank, even with the sponge bath one of the nurses had given him the day before, but he couldn't really bring himself to care.

McKay looked at John over the tops of his wire-rimmed glasses. His face was a blank, but after a long moment he slowly raised both his eyebrows. John tried resolutely not to let his face heat, because seriously? But all McKay said was, "If I'm not mistaken, so have you."

Not much John could say to that, so he settled for flipping McKay the bird and switched on the small TV that was bolted to the wall. He didn't get enough of a reaction from that, so he switched from a cooking show to Fox News.

McKay, it turned out, had a pretty extensive vocabulary of invective.

***

John signed himself out on the sixth day. Against doctor's orders; the nurse holding up the clipboard for his signature clucked her tongue at him. She was fussy and frumpy, with a head of thick, red curls that haloed her face in a frizzy cloud, and the way she asked him _are you sure you understand the possible implications?_ made him want to roll his eyes.

"Pretty sure," he said mildly, and wasn't at all surprised when she waved away his insurance card and told him that that nice Dr McKay had already made arrangements for billing.

"And you never told us you were in the Air Force!" the nurse said, leaning in just enough to give the illusion of confidentiality. "You know, I've always admired you boys so much? My nephew, he's thinking of enlisting next year and we're all so proud."

John tried to smile at that, even though it made all the muscles in his face ache. He got out of there as fast as he could after that, before McKay got back and John ended up back in places he didn't want to be. He needed a drink.

***

He ended up at the Sin City, same as always, nursing a just-cold-enough bottle of Bud. The guy behind the bar didn't mention the fact that John had been away for a couple of days, but John liked to think that the guy grunted at him in a way that said maybe John had been missed. John worked his way through two bottles and was thinking about maybe letting himself feel a little maudlin before McKay showed up.

It said something about the past few days that John was only surprised it had taken McKay this long to arrive. He was getting to be something of a constant.

"Beer?"

"Please, like I'd drink any of that watery piss you people call beer."

"'You people'?" John looked up to see that McKay was a little frayed around the edges. His suit was as neat and well-tailored as ever, his dress shirt crisp, but the knot in his tie was a little sloppy and there were dark circles under his eyes. Stopping an alien invasion probably meant you had to work a lot of overtime.

"We've been over this," McKay said. "I'm Canadian. You know, that large, cold bit to the north of us where they've long recognised the importance of good beer and healthcare?"

John cocked an eyebrow at him. Baiting McKay could turn into one of John's favourite pastimes—it was fun, and had the added benefit of distracting him from the way his body ached, from all the slow-healing scars that were maybe proof that John hadn't learned even as much as he'd thought he had. "So you… don't want a beer?"

"Right now," McKay said tartly, "I want a bottle of tequila—without any goddamned lime—and two weeks on a beach in Hawaii. But we don't tend to get what we want—and besides, I'm driving. Come on."

"McKay, I'm not—"

"Oh, you are so coming with me." McKay tossed a couple of large bills on the counter to pay for John's drinks—which was a good thing because John had just realised that all he had in his wallet were three quarters and an overdrawn credit card. None of the barkeepers here liked him _that_ much. "Right now. Trust me, everyone will be much happier if we go about this the easy way."

John knocked back the last of his beer. "Thought you knew I don't like doing things the easy way."

"Hrm, yes," McKay said, pulling out his car keys from his pocket, "Testosterone. We'll just take all your manly posturings as a given and be on our way, shall we?"

It wasn't like John had anything better to do.

***

McKay's car was German and expensive-looking, with soft leather seats, a souped-up sound system, and a travel mug of coffee sitting in both cup holders. The drive north took them a little more than an hour, and was spent mostly in silence. That surprised John a little—he wasn't dumb enough to think McKay wanted him around for the pleasure of his company, and he was expecting some kind of sales pitch while John was a captive audience. He didn't get anything more than a brief lecture on how the seats had been custom designed to meet McKay's specific orthopaedic needs until they passed the first sign that said _Air Force Flight Test Center (Detachment 3) — Authorized Personnel Only Beyond This Point_.

John raised an eyebrow. "You dragged me out to Area 51 without any fanfare a few days ago, and now it's all cloak-and-dagger?"

"So sue me for trying to keep some of the mystery alive," McKay said. He slowed just enough to flash an ID card at some guards who waved him on further into the base.

"They let you take whoever you want on base, huh?" John asked, looking back over his shoulder at the security checkpoint.

"No," McKay said, lightly enough to make John instantly suspicious. "They've just been expecting you."

***

Inside, the air conditioning was turned on strong enough to make John shiver despite his jacket.

"We managed to recover some Wraith tech from the site," McKay said without John having to ask, leading him down one long, fluorescent-lit corridor and turning left into another. "Mostly in very small pieces, but we think we can put it back together. It doesn't function at optimum levels in heat like you get in Nevada, but the Air Force, in its infinite wisdom…"

"You going to tell me why I'm here?" John's skin was itchy with adrenaline. He hadn't spent this much time around anything Air Force since they'd kicked him out, and the sound of his shoes on the floor tiles, the familiar smell of military-grade floor polish, made him feel claustrophobic. The urge to turn and run was strong, but his curiosity was stronger—or maybe just his sense that when McKay said that going willingly with him was the easier option, he'd meant it.

Fifty feet down the corridor, a door opened and a blonde, curly head poked out. "Took you long enough, Meredith. Well? Come on, hurry up, it's not like we have all day."

The head vanished again. McKay let his head roll back on his shoulders and shoved his hands into his trouser pockets. "My sister," he offered by way of explanation.

John was focused on the most important piece of information. "Meredith? Seriously?"

"You heard the woman," McKay said with a sigh that spoke of long-suffering, walking on towards the lab. "You don't want to keep her waiting."

***

Jean McKay-Miller was a strange kind of mirror image of her brother. Her skirt suit was immaculately tailored to fit the curves of her body, the slant of her mouth as determined as McKay's, but her hair was fighting its way loose of its chignon and she'd kicked off her expensive-looking high heels underneath her desk. If he'd had any other kind of a month, John might have found it odd to be standing in the middle of a alien technology research lab in Area 51 being harangued by a barefoot Canadian astrophysicist and her freak-genius brother—as it was, he just shrugged his shoulders and went with it.

"Any particular reason you want me to sit in this thing?" John stood to one side, at what he felt was a respectful distance from it. The first time McKay had shown the chair to him, the sight of it had been thrilling, but almost dying while trying to stop an alien invasion was apparently what it took to make John wary. Still, he couldn't quite take his eyes off it, and even while he spoke with the McKay siblings, John was watching it: a chair like a cathedral throne formed of stained glass and sweetly curving metal. John knew without going near it that the chair would be slightly warm to the touch, smooth against the palms of his hands, and the only thing creepier than having that kind of unlearned knowledge in his head was that he had the urge to sit in the damned thing anyway.

"Haven't we been through this already? Several times." McKay squinted at him before ticking off points on his fingers. "Been to a parallel universe, met an alternate you, learned that you have a strong natural expression of the ATA gene which means that Ancient technology responds to your commands about as well as it would to those of an actual Ancient, reported same back to the SGC which has a vested interest in finding out if you have the same abilities as that other John Sheppard."

John was pointedly not thinking about the fact that there was at least one other him walking around in some other universe. Poor bastard. "But you want me to _sit_ in it."

"I see that the level of intelligence is also a universal constant. Yes, yes, I want you to sit in it—have we not made that abundantly clear already?"

John pointed at the chair, vaguely aware that he was maybe over-reacting just a little, arguing for the hell of it, but he thought he'd earned a little pushback. "You want me to activate furniture from another galaxy with my ass?"

McKay threw his hands up in the air in mock-despair before turning to his sister. "Well," he said, "you're the one with the toddler. You deal with him."

"Madison is six," his sister said dryly. "You'd know that if you hadn't missed her last birthday."

"I was fifty light years away! Forgive me if watching twenty kids high on sugar shrieking about—"

John got the impression this was a long-running argument. Entertaining as it might be at other times, right now he just wasn't in the mood for it. "How about I just sit in the chair?"

***

For the first moment there was nothing—and then John felt light at his fingertips, blooming white in all the dark spaces behind his closed eyelids. The length of his spine relaxed, and it was like that feeling of clarity John had only ever had when he was flying—except this time, he wasn't moving at all. John was the still point at the centre of everything, the whole world orbiting around him bright with kinetic potential, and if his cheeks weren't wet with the shock of it, that was only because he couldn't quite trust in the reality of it yet. The chair was all angles and light in his mind, and when it whispered _welcome_ to him, it showed John a place that must be what a home looked like: salt-water towers climbing out of a dark-green sea, light against an evening sky. He could feel his back arching, the stitches pulling against the seams of just-healing flesh, he was awe-struck and shaking; under his breath, John mumbled an act of contrition in his mother's half-remembered Latin, _deus meus, ex toto corde paenitet me_, because he'd never trusted that he'd find something like this and yet here it was—waiting for him all along.

***

"Yeah," he said when he could speak, voice hoarse and the long muscles in his legs trembling like he'd just sprinted for miles. "Yeah, okay, I'm in."

John closed his eyes after he said that, couldn't look at McKay even while the other man started talking with animation about preparation, blue eyes lit up—because he had the feeling that once he went in on this, he'd be all in, there'd be no going back, and it terrified him that he wasn't scared about that.

***

General Hank Landry was an asshole. That was clear even before John got to the SGC—just getting onto the plane that was waiting to take John and McKay from Area 51 to Colorado required signing a stack of non-disclosure forms and a half hour phone call that left McKay white and puce by turns.

"As if you weren't—though I don't know why I'm bothering to tell you this," McKay said, lacing up his boots with deft fingers. John tried not to look at his hands too much.

McKay had excused himself to go say goodbye to his sister while John was ploughing his way through the mound of paperwork and returned carrying a duffle bag and wearing a set of black BDUs that fit just snugly enough across his shoulders and biceps to make John notice. "You've been in the Air Force, you know how idiotic the protocols can be, and of all the idiots in the Air Force, Landry is the one that most needs to solve his vicious case of cranio-rectal inversi—"

"McKay," John said, looking at the Marine who'd been assigned to guard the door while John worked through the paperwork. He was pretty sure he'd been assigned a guard because of where he was, not who he was, and judging by the twitch of his mouth, the Marine was more amused by McKay than anything else, but still. Old habits died hard.

"Pfft," McKay said. "You'll see when we get there."

John did. Landry was the kind of career officer who always made John's spine stiffen and put the worst kind of _go fuck yourself_ smirk on his face. "So, Mr Sheppard," he said when he walked into the conference room, "Dr McKay thinks that you'll be able to help us with a little problem of ours."

"Little problem," John said, balancing his tone somewhere between a flat statement and a question because he'd seen what one Wraith could do and didn't think a galaxy of them could be classified as a _little problem_; because the condescending tone in Landry's voice set his teeth on edge; because the last time a military officer had called him 'Mr Sheppard', John was being kicked out of the Air Force he'd given twenty years of his life and his best friends to.

"Our expedition to Atlantis is in need of your skills," Landry continued, as if John hadn't spoken. "Even with the ATA gene therapy, we don't have enough soldiers there capable of operating Ancient weaponry—and I've been told your expression of the gene is stronger than most."

"Uh huh," John said, slouching low in his seat, and he could have predicted how it went from there. Landry could have given Patrick Sheppard a master class in how to communicate with the set of his mouth, the tightening of the lines around his eyes, and a warmly patronising tone that John really had no choice but to cooperate. He slid a single, densely typed piece of paper and a fountain paper across the table to John when he'd finished talking, clapped him on the shoulder with false camaraderie and left the room.

John was smart enough to know bullshit when he smelled it, and also smart enough to know that not just Landry, but the Air Force, had him over a barrel. He could have chosen not to go with McKay back in Vegas, or not to sign the non-disclosure forms. He hadn't even signed a formal contract yet, and there was nothing stopping him from getting up and walking out of the SGC right now. But he was more than aware that he knew what they knew, and between that and the gene, he was too valuable now for the Air Force to let him drop out of their sights. Too risky. John didn't think that they'd make him disappear in the middle of the night—if he feared that coming from anywhere, it was from a couple of Vegas bookies and their goons—but he wasn't enthralled at the idea of spending the rest of his life with some bureaucrats looking over his shoulder, watching every move he made and measuring every word he said. If he wanted that, he could have been a good little boy and gone to Washington with his dad.

It took him a while to mull it over, drumming out _In the Jailhouse Now_ on the tabletop with his fingertips, a measure more wryness to the rhythm than Johnny Cash had ever managed. What the hell, he figured in the end—this Atlantis place couldn't be a hell of a lot worse than Vegas had turned out to be, even if that strange, insistent promise of _home_ he'd felt while sitting in the chair didn't turn out to be true. McKay talked about it with a strange kind of fondness, and the man might have been kind of a weirdo but John thought he was a trustworthy one. He pissed and he moaned and he blustered, but he hadn't lied to John, and every now and then, McKay leaned in toward him as if he thought he would find warm solidity there. He'd said, way back at the beginning of everything, that he knew everything about John—and maybe that had meant McKay knew enough to be honest with him.

The contract offered standard terms and conditions for an Air Force contractor, hazard pay and rank equivalency and Earthside leave offered after twelve months service. John signed on the dotted line with big, looping letters, then underlined his signature for good measure. In for a penny, in for a pound.

***

John didn't see McKay much over the next few weeks. McKay split his time between the SGC and Area 51, working on half a dozen different projects while they were still on Earth. John learnt the ropes at the SGC. Officially he was a civilian consultant, but the training he was put through reminded him more than a bit of what basic had been like, and he had a good five or six years and a couple of hundred thousand miles on most of the people here. His knee ached at the end of each day, he didn't recognise half the faces he passed in the corridors, and the rock-hard mattress in the SGC guest quarters didn't do much for the knots in his back, but he got to blow the shit out of targets a lot, which wasn't so bad—not just with P90s, but also with an honest-to-god alien blaster gun called a zat.

The instructor assigned to him was a Captain Ford—a member of McKay's team who could strip and reassemble a P90 in twenty seconds, and whose smile was more genuine than most people's here. John took to eating dinner with him in the mess. Ford was sadly misguided when it came to college football, and he had a disconcerting habit of putting ketchup on pretty much every meal he ate, but he was willing to talk to John, which was more than a lot of people here would do—John was still an unknown quantity in a community which had been fused together by more than one kind of loss, and he wouldn't have bet against his discharge being common knowledge here either.

Ford had been one of the first people to go to Atlantis, and he was able to fill John in on who was who. John couldn't put names with faces yet, anymore than he could reconcile the floor plans of the city that McKay had shown him with what he'd seen when he'd sat in the control chair, but from Ford he learned all the things that McKay hadn't bothered to tell him and that the official training seminars tended to gloss over: not only how many people lived in the city, but also how they all gelled together; the names of the peoples and planets the expedition had made an alliance with and who to look out for; how the expedition teams were organised and what they did.

"First response team is me and Teyla and Ronon," Ford said, digging into a mound of mashed potatoes. "Teyla's Athosian—they're the first people we met when we got to Pegasus—she's tiny but she could probably snap you in two with her pinky. Ronon's from Sateda, he's pretty cool. Oh, and McKay, of course."

John swallowed his mouthful of turkey sandwich. "McKay's on a gate team?" He'd seen McKay in BDUs plenty of times, sure, and between the biceps and the surprising lack of bluster at times when they met a Marine in the corridors who _was_ heavily armed, John wouldn't be surprised to hear that McKay knew how to use a gun. Took a little doing to make his mental image of McKay reconcile with someone who'd be active in the field, though.

"Yeah," Ford said, dumping a fifth packet of sugar into his coffee. "Didn't want to be at first. He can be kind of… you know…"

"Pissy?" John suggested.

"I was going to say he whines a lot, but that works too." Ford grinned and took a gulp of his coffee. "But he got better—we all had to get better. Only took him six, seven missions."

John leaned back in his chair and cocked an eyebrow. "This a story I need to hear?"

Ford's smile turned mischievous. "I think this is a story everyone needs to hear."

***

The SGC had a full complement of chaplains to minister to a workforce that came from all over the world—not just the US, but also China and India, the UK and Japan and Russia. There were two Catholic chaplains, but John found himself seeking out Fr Luis the most. John didn't want to receive Communion or make his confession, but Fr Luis never brought that up. He seemed just as happy to sit there and drink a beer as John was; pursed his lips and gave the same amount of consideration to the question when John wanted to know why the hell Notre Dame sucked so much as he did when John asked him if he'd ever known guys who had second thoughts about going.

"Maybe," Fr Luis said, gaze fixed on the TV screen. "Why do you want to know?"

John wanted to say _no reason, nothing to do with me_, but no matter what he'd ever done—in the bedroom or outside of it—he wasn't a bad enough Catholic to be able to outright lie to a priest. "Wondering," he said, and knocked back another mouthful of beer. Sin of omission was probably fine.

Fr Luis looked over at him for a long moment, then back at the screen just as the spectators stood to cheer on a touchdown. "Then—yes. Many. You hear stories before you go, and the stories you hear are always the worst."

"Huh."

"Of course," Fr Luis said with an air of studied nonchalance, scratching at his mop of thick white hair, "most of those guys went through the gate anyway."

John huffed out a laugh, because that was why he liked Fr Luis—he never tried to be sneaky about the fact that he could be a bit of a bastard.

***

Two days before they were due to dial Atlantis, John got back to his quarters to find a small package sitting on his carefully made-up bed. It was wrapped ineffectually in brown paper and string, with knots tangled enough that John had to cut them open with his penknife. Inside was a blank DVD with 'GAME' scrawled on it in black Sharpie and a package of microwave popcorn. John raised an eyebrow at the DVD before digging through the wrapping paper to find the accompanying note.

_Essentials for the trip_, it said in McKay's blocky script. _See you Thursday._

John's other eyebrow went up, but he put the disc into the player and cued it up. The menu said 'Boston College Eagles vs. the University of Miami Hurricanes. November 23, 1984,' and John remembered being sixteen and watching this game with his heart in his throat, punching the air when Phelan caught that pass, wearing out a VCR copy of this game back in Kandahar when he needed to remind himself that Hail Marys could work.

_I know everything about you_, McKay had said. John sat down carefully on the end of his bed and watched Boston College jump to a 14-0 lead, first quarter. _Okay_, he thought, _okay_. He'd go anyway.

***

The day before they dialled out, John sent out a package of his own. Not back to McKay, but to an office building in Washington DC: _Hunter and Heidi Sheppard, c/o David Sheppard, CEO_. His nephew and niece were the only people he could think of as beneficiaries when it came time to fill out the life insurance policy that the SGC 'strongly recommended' for anyone going to Atlantis, though he'd never met them. It wasn't that either of them would ever be in want of money, John thought when he threw the envelope in the mail—but the extra cash might help pay for the counselling they'd need to get over being twins called Hunter and Heidi.

He sent a postcard to Mikey, care of the sleazy, smoky dive bar where he tended to hang out with the rest of his little group. The front was a photograph of a beach in the Carolinas, all primary colours and white sand. On the back, in his neatest block capitals, John printed 'FUCK YOU, MIKEY. SHEPPARD.' Lacked a little in class, maybe, but it definitely put a smile on John's face.

***

The gate room the next morning was noisy. John stood off to one side, pack on his back, watching with vague bemusement as McKay and Colonel Carter got things organised. He wouldn't have figured McKay for the kind of guy who could get people lined up in a row—make 'em scatter, sure—but there he was, making order out of chaos even if his tone at times did shade over the line into what John might just call snide.

"I believe I asked for the pallets to be _there_," McKay was yelling. "This is supposed to be a finely tuned operation, ladies and gentlemen, run by the best and brightest Earth has to offer, and yet I am watching as equipment which could one day be used to save your collective asses is being shunted to one side."

"Is it always like this?" John asked Ford.

"Yeah, pretty much every time we get leave back here." Ford quirked an eyebrow at him while he tightened a strap on his own backpack. Whatever the kid had stashed in there, it made for a pack large enough that John was surprised he could stand up straight—he looked like a turtle carrying his home on his back. "Things are pretty cool on Atlantis, but there's something about being back here that just makes—I normally head back to my grandparents on leave."

"Smart," John said, watching with amusement as McKay and Jennifer Keller wrangled over what looked like a pallet full of medical supplies; antibiotics, mostly. He wasn't sure whom he should bet on—McKay had the track record, but Keller was wiry.

"It's called self-preservation, man," Ford said with a laugh.

The conversation around them slowly ebbed away at some cue John didn't catch. After a moment or two, Colonel Mitchell hopped up onto the foot of the ramp and looked around him. He looked the part, John had to give him that—blue-eyed and energetic with such an enthusiasm for the flag and Mom's apple-pie that John had no trouble figuring out why the SGC had given him the military command of Atlantis. Still, Teal'c seemed to tolerate him well enough, and over the past couple of weeks, John had come to realise that if someone was okay with Teal'c, that was good enough for him.

"Okay, boys and girls," Mitchell said, "Some of you are heading back to Atlantis, but for some of you this is your very first time going to Pegasus. This is your last chance for second thoughts. Remember, you go through that gate, you don't come back for at least a year."

No one left the gate room, though John was pretty sure that McKay rolled his eyes and earned a jab in the ribs from Carter for his pains.

Mitchell grinned. "Okay, let's get this dog and pony show on the road. Walter, fire her up."

No matter how many times John saw the wormhole flare into existence, it was always a shock—to see math made into pure light, into a rich shade of blue that John had only ever seen when he was sitting in the command chair, when he was asleep and dreaming of the sky beyond atmosphere, seen through the windshield of an F22. He'd been off world a time or two since he got here—milk runs to the alpha and beta sites and to the Jaffa homeworld, both calculated to give him and the other trainees a feel for what it was to breath the air of another world without experiencing much by way of danger. He'd never walked out of his life and into an impossible city.

Command staff went through first, then a group of Marines, each one tugging a pallet of supplies behind them. Ford and John were in the group of stragglers, boots ringing on the ramp as they walked towards the event horizon. John hesitated for just a moment, a hitch in his step because there'd been safety of a kind in Vegas and he had know idea what he was getting himself in for.

"Come on, man," Ford said and clapped him on the shoulder. "It's not like it hurts!"

And John took a breath, and walked.

***

Atlantis was overwhelming. They went from some indeterminate point in the SGC's never-ending day to the full splendour of a Lantean morning. Stained glass refracted and shattered the rising sun into multicoloured rays of light, more splendid that anything that the Vegas Strip had ever created with neon and desert sunlight, and the polished stone floors radiated heat through the soles of John's boots.

Behind him, the wormhole winked out of existence. Zelenka and some of the other scientists were busy directing the supply pallets away down narrow, curving corridors. Mitchell was loping up a set of steps to a broad balcony that looked like it was an ops centre, some of the new scientists were shouldering their backpacks and following a guy called Chuck off in the direction of the residential quarters, and John stood there feeling kind of lost and kind of at home. Same old, same old.

"So," McKay said from next to him, "what do you think?"

John looked over at him. McKay had his hands in his pockets, shoulders back and relaxed, and he looked almost smug—one day, John was going to get up the courage to ask McKay just what the hell it was he'd seen when he'd met that alternate John, just what it was that made him so certain that John was supposed to be standing here next to him.

"You get to… this is every day?" John asked, surprised to hear that his voice sounded a little thick.

"Yeah," McKay said, and he rarely sounded frivolous, but right now he was absolutely serious. Then he smiled—really smiled, a smile that wasn't holding anything back. It was an expression John wasn't used to seeing on McKay's face, especially not focused solely on John like that, and it was enough to make him believe McKay when he said, "Yeah. You'll see."

***

John got his own workspace, which was all kinds of bizarre. He'd coasted his way through his Master's in engineering, and here he was sharing a couple of square feet of desk and a laptop with people with multiple PhDs who were working on projects so advanced the math just about made John's eyes water. There were times when he shuffled into the labs in the morning, cup of coffee in hand, and wondered if the last few years had been some kind of strange hallucination—that he'd tripped and hit his head on a particularly drunken night out with Mitch and Dex. By all rights, the USAF shouldn't have let him within half a mile of a military base with the kind of record he had, and yet here he was, thanks to a quirk in the coil of his genes, helping Miko Kusanagi reverse engineer a pretty sweet Ancient version of a rifle.

It shot _lasers _. John would never not find that cool.

He didn't spend a lot of time at his desk, though. The skills that John was fumbling to regain were nowhere near so important in Atlantis as the innate, ungovernable skill he had to work as a human on-off switch—there were other people with the gene, but few of them expressed it as strongly as John, or were so readily available to be co-opted by the science team.

Mostly, it worked out okay, and John had helped uncover some pretty cool stuff, but he could have done without the scientists playing tug of war over him.

"Guys," he said on his fourth morning in Atlantis, staring up at the blue-and-copper ceiling, "this isn't very dignified."

"Shut up," both of them said simultaneously. McKay had a hand around John's wrist and was tugging him in one direction; Zelenka had a death-grip on a handful of John's t-shirt.

"I'm field combat trained," McKay said, narrowing his eyes. "I could kill you with my _thumb_."

"Please," Zelenka answered. "Was raised in Soviet Prague. Could kill you with my pinky."

McKay won. Not that John was surprised—it hadn't taken him long to realise that McKay was the kind of guy who got his way in most things—but as he ambled down the corridor after McKay, who was talking a mile a minute about some device that the Marines had unearthed down in the lower levels of the city, John said, "You know, you're not like I first figured."

"Really." The look McKay shot him was bird-bright and keen, as if he was delighted that John had finally realised something he should have known long ago. "And should I ask what your first impressions were?"

John cocked his head to one side. "Maybe not. There were a whole lot of four letter words."

McKay made a show of considering that. "You know, my ex-wife would say that your first impressions were actually pretty accurate."

"Uh huh." John had noticed the ring, a gold band that had sat snugly on McKay's finger until the day before they gated back to Atlantis, but asking about it had always seemed a little bit desperate.

"I was married to Carter, by the way," McKay said, so suddenly that John wondered if he'd slipped up and spoken out loud. "Sam, I mean."

John blinked, and then his brain caught up with his ears. "Wait, you—_Colonel_ Sam Carter? Second-in-command of the SGC Sam Carter?"

"Hmm," McKay said, keying their destination into the panel in the transporter. "Yes. One of the more interesting twenty-seven months of my life, I have to say. Even if there was ample compensation by way of…" McKay waved his hands around in the air in a way that John supposed was meant to represent 'curvaceous blonde' but looked more like 'this woman would not be able to stand upright without tipping over.' "Anyway, I thought it was one of those things you ought to know."

"Right now," John asked, deadpan, as they stepped out of the transporter and headed towards the city's gate room. He refrained from asking why it was something that he in particular needed to know.

"Well, no time like the present," McKay said blithely.

John stared at him until McKay reddened just a little, and said, "Shut up."

***

It was funny, the things John missed about Earth. He missed playing pool down at the bar; missed taking the Camaro out on aimless drives into the desert, putting his foot down on the accelerator until the world rushed past him in a blur of blue and gold. He missed sitting on his couch in his underwear on a Saturday morning, watching the Food Network and working his way through an enormous bowl of Lucky Charms. He missed double bacon cheeseburgers and chasing pick pockets across the casino floor of the Mirage, missed the click of poker chips and the curve of a beer bottle in the palm of his hand when he sat back and watched a game.

But all of those were things, not people. There was no one on Earth with the strength to pull him back there—Mitch and Dex and Holland were gone; Nancy was gone; he and David had always held one another in little more than a weak, elliptical orbit—and after a few days waking up with the sound of an alien ocean in his ears, John found he was mostly pretty content with what he had.

He taped a poster of Johnny Cash over his headboard, and found that that took care of the rest.

***

McKay went offworld a lot. His team was nominally led by Ford, as the only ranking member of the Earth military, but McKay had enough influence to make sure that no mission ever started before he'd had time to have a full breakfast and at least two large mugs of coffee. He and his team had a regular table over by the long windows of the mess hall; it wasn't that they commandeered it, as such, but by unspoken agreement no one else sat there.

Except for John, it seemed, who'd been waved over by an enthusiastic Ford his first morning on Atlantis. McKay greeted him with an inarticulate mumbling—words for once stoppered up in his mouth by spoonfuls of the thick porridge that steamed in the bowl in front of him—but Ford remembered to introduce the others sitting at the table to John.

"This is Teyla Emmagan," Ford said, nodding at the woman who sat opposite him. Petite and with perfect posture, her coppery hair was pulled back into a tight, waist-length braid; she inclined her head solemnly at John, but didn't smile. "Leader of the Athosian people and our military liaison with them."

"I have heard much about you, Mr Sheppard," she said, and split a bagel neatly and precisely in two with her knife. "Welcome to Atlantis." Her tone of voice gave John no clue how he was supposed to take that.

"And this," Ford continued, "is Specialist Ronon Dex."

Specialist Ronon Dex looked like a photograph from one of the magazines John had kept hidden in a battered cardboard box at the back of his closet when he was a confused and over-sexed teenager. He was tall and built, with close-cropped, curling hair and a goatee, and the look he sent John over his bowl of porridge was one of pure suspicion. "Hey."

"Hi," John replied, giving Dex a nod that he hoped spoke of nonchalant confidence.

Dex blinked at him and then returned to his breakfast without either saying anything further or telling him to get up and leave, which John supposed was a sign that he'd passed at least Round One. Presuming that there were rounds, of course—John wasn't entirely sure how this thing was supposed to go.

When breakfast was over, the team stood up, chair legs scraping against the heated stone floors. "Better get to the armoury," Ford said, clapping John on the shoulder. "Get there late for a scheduled dial-out, Mr Woolsey gets cranky."

"Sure," John said. "See you later." He sat and peeled the skin off the lumpy blue fruit that Miko had gotten him hooked on and watched the others leave. Dressed in dull khaki camouflage BDUs, they stood out from the dwindling crowd of other people still breakfasting—the scientists in uniform blue; the military in faded black—as much for their uniform as for the way they moved together. Ford took point, Dex to the rear, McKay and Emmagan in the middle, with the unconsciousness that came of long practice.

As they went through the door, McKay said something to Emmagan and she looked up at him and smiled—an unexpectedly brilliant expression that transformed her entire face—and John was surprised to find himself a little jealous. He remembered knowing what that kind of camaraderie was like, back in Afghanistan—hanging out with Mitch and Holland and the guys; mocking Mitch's love for weird Japanese anime and snorting beer out of his nose at another of Holland's endless array of fart jokes, drunk and sun-burned; knowing that any one of those guys would take a bullet for him, sure as breathing; the punch in the gut when one of them had.

Maybe there weren't people he missed back on Earth, but maybe there were things he was missing right here.

***

There was always plenty to do on Atlantis during downtime, available in the kind of carefully ordered way that said some administrator had been put in charge of it because they were very concerned at the possibility of people going nuts. There was a gym, where Emmagan gave lessons in how to beat people with sticks and taught an Athosian discipline that was like a scary, aggressive version of yoga. There were routes around the city that had been set up for people who liked to run, a basketball court that Mitchell and some of the others from the USAF seemed to have commandeered, and a soccer field out on the south pier, a small library and a movie theatre and even little seminars once a week where some of the expedition's researchers gave progress reports on their work in an interdisciplinary atmosphere.

The base psychiatrist, during John's mandatory appointments, gently suggested on one or two occasions that John might enjoy participating in group activities as a means of alleviating stress.

John worked his way through _War and Peace_ for the third time, and puzzled his way through some of the math problems that McKay emailed him from time to time. John never asked why McKay sent them, or how he knew that John would be able to tackle them; McKay never talked about them.

***

John was watching from the gate room when McKay and his team came back hot from five separate missions, bullets following them through the wormhole to ricochet off the walls and shatter panels of stained glass; when they came back triumphant with the prospect of new trade agreements and strengthened alliances; when they returned with blood on the blade of Emmagan's knife and Ford's mouth set in a thin line.

John had never had to live through things from this end; he'd always been the one down on the ground, tossing off a sloppy salute at harried onlookers and sloping off to be checked over by the medics. Now he was standing by, watching while other people went out and fought to keep him safe, and—well, to be honest, it was kind of fucked up.

Woolsey usually kept vigil in his office, but every now and then he would come stand near John. They must have made an odd couple, waiting for a team that was four hours overdue from a strike against a hive ship—John bracing himself against the railings, grip so tight that his hands were white-knuckled, boots half-laced and five o'clock stubble shading into evening; Woolsey immaculate and straight-backed in a bespoke suit that probably cost more than John had earned in a year back in Vegas. Once, Woolsey intoned, without looking directly at John, "They also serve who only stand and wait."

John felt his mouth twitch upwards into something that might have been a smile, but he didn't take his gaze away from the gate. "Dan Brown, right?" he said. John might be on the other side of things now, the one who waited for people to come back to him, but that didn't mean John couldn't be an asshole about it.

He was still standing there when McKay came through the gate with the others; still standing there, and tried to tell himself it was just a coincidence that he was the first person McKay looked up for, sought out amongst the crowd.

***

Miko let him take the prototype of the laser rifle down to the shooting range to test it. Unlike most of the scientists on Atlantis, she was more interested in the theoretical than in the practical applications of her work. Once the challenge of the engineering was done, she turned it over to him and went back to work on the ZPM project.

John went willingly, because it was an honest-to-god _laser rifle_, one that he'd helped make with his own hands, with a sight that he could focus using his _mind_, and it was freaky and cool all at once, just like Atlantis was. He lined up and aimed and exhaled, and in the space between one heartbeat and the next, he fired. The shot left a hole two inches wide right in the centre of the paper target's chest—now there was some experimental evidence to bring back to Miko—and John let out a low whistle when he tugged the target free from the clip that held it up.

Dex, who was at the next space over, looked at the target, then at John, then raised a single eyebrow. "You make that gun?"

"Some," John said. "I helped."

"Huh," Dex answered, before his mouth quirked into as much of a smile as John had ever seen Dex direct at him. "Good. Maybe we'll keep you."

"Okay," John said slowly, because what else could you say to that?

Dex shrugged. "I like useful," he said, and then turned and easy as breathing, put three shots straight through the target's centre of mass.

***

McKay tossed a wax cloth-covered package at him. John caught it easily and unwrapped it to find two sandwiches—thick wedges of the Athosian sourdough-style bread filled with some kind of meat and salad. The sight of the food made John's stomach rumble, and he checked the time on his computer monitor; so maybe he'd forgotten to have lunch. "Bringing me lunch now?"

McKay mumbled something unintelligible around the great bite of sandwich he'd already eaten. There was a smear of mayonnaise caught at the corner of his mouth, and John watched him lick it off with table manners a five-year-old would be proud of before saying, "So how's your chest?"

It was enough of a non sequitur that it took John a minute or so before he understood what McKay was talking about. "McKay, I got shot four months ago."

"Yes, so? And? I am allowed to express concern about your well-being, aren't I?" McKay tore off a piece of crust and stuffed it in his mouth. "As, as your _friend_, I am allowed to say 'That was a serious injury, and I hope you are fully recovered.'"

"Is that what we are?" John asked, leaning back in his chair and folding his arms.

"I resent any accusation to the contrary," McKay said, but he looked down at the lab desk rather than meet John's eyes, and there was a flush of pink at the high points of his cheekbones. Interesting, though maybe not so unexpected. _I know everything about you_, McKay had said, but he'd never said what he'd learnt from that other Sheppard about himself.

"What do you want?" John said, picking up his own sandwich.

"I don't know what—oh, fine," McKay said, rolling his eyes when he saw how John was arching an eyebrow. "This is why I usually leave the tact stuff to Teyla. I want you—well, I mean, I asked Woolsey and he okayed it, so whatever—so _it has been agreed_ that it mightn't be a bad idea if you were put into rotation on a gate team."

John's sandwich was suddenly a lot less interesting. "You've noticed I'm not military anymore, right?"

"Ha," Rodney said, as if John had been trying to be funny. "And I'm a poster boy for the Marine recruiters. Look, it's not like we're asking you to go out on a first response team, but it would be an asset to have another gene carrier going off-world. Both Ford and I successfully received the gene therapy, but AR-4 and AR-6 don't have a single member who's a carrier. They mostly do the milk-run missions, so it's not like you're going to be in harm's way. Much. Not _statistically_ speaking, at least."

John thought for a moment. "You had this planned right from the beginning, didn't you?"

"I have no idea what you're talking about." When he widened his eyes like that, McKay did a pretty good job at seeming guileless.

"Had a physical with Keller yesterday. She gave me a clean bill of health, but as far as you were concerned, it cleared me for active duty, right?"

"Semantics." McKay's chin tilted upwards, which John knew was a sure sign of bluster.

"Bullshit." John jabbed a finger at him. "Landry wanted me here because I have the gene. You got me here because what—because you think you know better than I do what I'm supposed to be doing with my life because of a couple of surveillance files and some kind of bad double of me?" John didn't know where the anger had come from, but there it was all of a sudden, bright hot and blooming beneath his rib cage: anger at the unfairness of how each time he'd built some sort of semblance of a life for himself, it had been taken away—the Air Force; Nancy; Vegas; this. "Fuck you, McKay. I was happy in Vegas."

McKay stared at him. "You thought that was good enough for you? You thought that life was enough?"

John didn't answer; he had a sneaking suspicion there was no good reply to that.

***

John thought he'd made his _no_ pretty clear, but he ended up with a roster for AR-4's off-world missions in his inbox, signed off on by Cam Mitchell, and a locker with his name on it in the prep room anyway. McKay was like a force of nature when he was convinced he was right—and John was coming to find that when McKay got stubborn like this, it was enough to make John uncertain about everything he'd thought before. He sighed, and hit print on the mission roster, and sent up a quiet prayer for patience. It was a quality that seemed to be in short supply on Atlantis; no wonder when someone like McKay was around.

John stuck the roster on the bulletin board that hung on the wall over his desk and stared at it for a long moment. _05/15—_, it said. _PX5-3764 (Qi'khalz)—Cataloguing artefacts found on abandoned Ancient outpost. 05/25—MX8-9754 (Riau)—follow-up visit with relocated settlers. 06/05—PZ4-8378 (Memil Udan)—follow-up visit on irrigation project._ The roster made his skin prickle, and John didn't know if that was because of the sheer thought of working with a team again, or if it was McKay, or if it was some freaky combination of the two.

Trying to figure it out made John's head hurt. He gave it up as a lost cause for now; tugged on sweats and a t-shirt and went for a run out on the west pier. It was drizzling, and the breeze was sharp against his face, and the pounding of his feet on the ground calmed him a little bit—let him focus on the almost imperceptible point on the horizon where grey sea merged with grey sky.

***

AR-4 seemed like good people. Major Gonzalez was solid and brusque, her hair cut in a no-nonsense bob; Dr Kaur was chatty and work-focused; Captain Olsen looked like he'd been drafted in from Central Casting, with a square jaw and a Minnesota accent that John hadn't thought existed outside of _Fargo_. John met with them once or twice before the morning of their first mission, letting them fill him in on PX5-3764, where they'd already been a time or two before.

"Nothing immediately exciting there, Mr Sheppard," Kaur had said in her sing-song accent, "but we believe some of the technology may have long-term applications, or at least that we may be able to retrofit it to some of the—"

"She means," Gonzalez had said, "you touch, she catalogues. Okay?"

"Yes, ma'am," John had said, and tried not to smirk.

Right now, they were in the locker room getting ready for their first mission together—Kaur trying to find some place in her already over-stuffed backpack for some more diagnostic equipment, Olsen double-knotting his bootlaces with careful precision, John checking the buckles on his tac vest with fingers made clumsy by memory.

"Don't forget," Gonzalez said, tucking a stray lock of hair behind her ear, "that—"

The ground beneath John's feet shuddered, and his ears rang with the dull, hollow _whump_ of a faraway explosion. John felt his knees bend instinctively to absorb the worst of the impact, but before the vibrations had died away, there was another explosion, and another—and John had already picked up his P90 and run for the door. There was confusion in the hallways, people hurrying in all directions, but John headed for the centre of the tower and the gate room.

At the intersection of two corridors, he met Emmagan, who matched his pace easily despite the long dress she was wearing, and didn't bother to ask where he was going. "What's going on?" John asked her.

"We are under attack," Emmagan said, each word clipped and short.

"Who—"

"There are ships," she said as they took the steps up to the control room two at a time. "Bombarding us from atmosphere. Rodney?"

McKay was bent over a console, fingers flying over the keys as his eyes followed a rapidly streaming series of numbers and Ancient characters on a screen. His jaw was clenched, and the normally precise line of his hair was mussed and rumpled, as if he'd been running his hands through it. "Two ships targeting us. I've got the shields up to maximum strength now and they should hold for at least a while, but—"

"Long range sensors are picking up a third ship entering the solar system and moving quickly," Amelia Banks called from the other side of the room.

"But there's also that," McKay said, standing up. Another blast deflected against the shield overhead; and maybe John was just closer to the epicentre this time, or maybe the shot was more powerful, because he could feel the shock of it jar his knees and send adrenaline spiking through his bloodstream.

"Report, please," Woolsey said as he came out of his office. His voice wasn't raised, and his shirt was still crisp and starched, but the lines around his eyes were deeper than John had ever seen them.

From down below on the gate room floor, John could hear Mitchell raising his voice at some of the Marines to get them to move faster down to the armoury, good ol' boy twang made sharper by the worry in his voice.

"Two ships attacking," McKay replied, calling up an image on the viewscreen. "A third on the way." The ships were a silvery grey, bland against the cloudy sky; to John's eye, they didn't look that different from some of the images of Ancient cruisers that he'd seen, but there was something off about them. Something wrong. "I'm pretty sure they're Asuran. They've been directing high energy bursts at key sites for energy generation and distribution throughout the city, but we managed to get the shield up to full strength before they inflicted any real damage."

"Asuran?" John asked. His fingers twitched against the stock of his rifle.

McKay looked over at him as if noticing for the first time that John was standing there. His eyes narrowed just a little, and for a moment John thought McKay was going to tell him to get out—not like a lab tech was supposed to be listening in on command debriefings in the gate room, after all—but instead McKay just said, "Asurans. Replicators."

"Okay," John said slowly, because he'd heard about Replicators from Mitchell, and most of what he'd heard had been conveyed in one-syllable words of four letters. "What do we do?"

"Guns are good," Dex said from behind him, making John startle. He hadn't heard Dex or Ford come up the staircase, which was doubly surprising given just how much weaponry both men were sporting. Dex had a .45 in one thigh holster, his own blaster in another, ammo and knives on a belt around his waist, and he and Ford carried a clutch of odd-looking weapons John hadn't seen before—like an XM8 rifle but with a shortened barrel and an odd attachment at the base. Ford handed one to John and one to Emmagan, and Dex rolled his eyes when McKay snatched a third from him.

"What does this do?" John asked.

"Anti-replicator gun," McKay answered, checking the gun over before giving a grunt of satisfaction and turning to tap something else into the computer system. "In the event of the shield failing, they're all that's going to stand between you and… well, a rather unpleasant death."

"What are the chances of the shield failing?" Woolsey asked.

"Currently a 68% chance that the shield will fall in the next hour, but—"

"Generator 3 is now running at only 25% capacity," Zelenka said from his workstation.

"Okay, a 73% chance that the shield will fail. And if that goes down, I don't care how quickly Colonel Mitchell and his troops fan out throughout the city, we will be quite effectively and thoroughly screwed."

Woolsey thought for a moment. "How quickly can we evacuate?"

"Emergency protocol dictates we can get out in under the 38 minute window, but if we just send non-essential pers—"

The lights in the room flickered off. Someone swore, and John could hear the familiar sound of Dex's blaster powering up—but then the lights came back on and as John's eyes readjusted to the lights, the image on the viewscreen changed from the ships overhead to an image of a woman. Slender and handsome, her dark hair fell in curls to her shoulders, and she held herself with the ease of someone who was used to attention. "Good afternoon, everyone," she said. There was a hint of amusement in her voice.

Dex looked impassive at her greeting, though John noticed that Ford turned to look at him with concern. McKay seemed stunned, his jaw slack—even Emmagan's eyes had widened. Woolsey recovered quicker than any of them, though—one of the virtues of being a trained diplomat, John supposed—and said, "Elizabeth. I don't suppose you'd mind giving us an explanation for this?"

"Richard." Elizabeth smiled. "I was wondering who they would send to replace me. How… expected."

"What do you want?" Woolsey said mildly. At least, John thought, he was clever enough not to let himself be goaded by something that obvious.

Elizabeth clasped her hands together in front of her, in an easy mimicry of a supplicant. "Atlantis," she said. "For a start." Her gaze flicked over to Dex for a moment, and John saw him use his thumb to flick the setting on his blaster from 'stun' to 'kill.'

"Please," John heard McKay huff, "can we just assume that we're going to say 'no' to that and you're going to move to the portion of the afternoon where you threaten to kill us all? Because it would be much more efficient and—"

"Dr McKay," Woolsey said without taking his eyes off the viewscreen. "Elizabeth, you know we're never going to give up the city. What do you really want? Perhaps we can find some ground for negotiation—a truce."

"I don't remember the IOC keeping its promises the last time we had this discussion," Elizabeth said, cocking her head to one side. "And if I remember correctly, you were one of the IOC's negotiators on that occasion."

"I understand your concerns," Woolsey started, and John winced—that was just the kind of bullshit line he'd used on a commanding officer a time or two, and no way was that not going to piss off anyone with half a brain. "But if we can put politics aside for a moment—"

Elizabeth's smile took on a sharper edge. "Never tell a politician to put aside politics, Richard. It never works, and it makes you look very silly indeed. You have fifteen minutes to surrender, or we will open fire once more. Weir out."

"Well," McKay said, folding his arms, "she's right about one thing," and John silently approved when Emmagan reached up and cuffed him over the back of the head.

***

"So," John said as McKay grabbed him by the cuff of his jacket and dragged him off down the spiral steps that led into the engineering hub of the city. McKay's finger tips were warm against his wrist; John wondered if McKay could feel how John's pulse was hammering. "I take it you guys have met this Elizabeth person before."

"Long story," McKay said, his voice sounding hollow as it echoed back off the walls of the stairwell. "My ex-boss, Ronon's ex… whatever. Used to be human, now she's part-robot and does this whole space pirate… thing; the part-robot bit may be _somewhat_ my fault, and she, uh. Holds grudges."

From behind him, John could hear both Emmagan and Captain Cadman let out snorts that were only partly amused. "Uh huh," John said.

"Less talking, more moving," McKay said, reaching the bottom of the steps and running along the corridor to the room where the control chair sat.

"Because we're going to do what, exactly?"

"You," McKay said, swiping his palm over the access panel to let them into the room, "are going to sit in that chair and concentrate really hard when I tell you to do so."

John raised an eyebrow at him, but sat in the chair like he was told. He'd have felt far better with a gun in his hand, as if he had something solid to work with, but McKay generally seemed to know what he was doing in situations like this. John felt the faint warmth of the chair lighting up beneath him, the strange, ticklish sensation of the chair's intelligence meeting his.

Emmagan and Cadman stood on either side of the doorway, petite sentinels with two anti-replicator guns apiece. McKay called up something on the Ancient interface, and even though John couldn't see it from where he was sitting, he could feel what McKay was accessing. "The shields are failing?"

"Partially," McKay confirmed. From overhead came the faint noise of another explosion. "We've lost coverage on the tip of the north pier, but the rest of the shield is still holding at 90%, and if I can just—just, hold on a moment."

John sighed. _Come with me_, McKay had said back up in the gate room, _I've got an idea_, but he still hadn't explained to John exactly what that bright idea was. "Mind explaining this yet?"

McKay's fingertips clacked over the keyboard. "The ARGs manipulate energy on a subspace level to disrupt the keron pathways that link an Asuran's individual nanites. Because the Asurans are partly organic, it doesn't work as successfully as with old-school replicators, but it should buy us a few minutes—and if I can change the subspace frequency at which Atlantis' laser weapons operate…"

"… you can use them as laser cannon to take out their ship."

"Exactly. And then you are going to send out some of the tactical drones to destroy as many of the pieces as we can before the ships can reform. Okay, set up is finished. Can you see how to do it?"

And the weird thing was, John could—he could close his eyes and trace the adaptations McKay had made to the frequency of the lasers, feel the impulse in his mind that would trigger them; see the hundreds of drones coiled and waiting for his command. "Yeah," he said, feeling his fingers twitch deeper into the command console. "Yeah, I can."

The comm unit in John's ear crackled. _Zelenka here—third Asuran ship has entered atmosphere. Shields cannot hold if it begins to fire_.

"Got it. We've got it," McKay snapped back. Then, "John. _Now_."

And John let go.

***

It was like setting his mind free—letting it arc out in three beams of blue light that unpicked the bonds that held together the Asuran ships. They fell back towards the ocean and so did he, only to rise back up again on the prism of hundreds of different drones. The explosions were vivid and sharp, fire blooming behind John's eyelids, and when he opened his eyes again, he was breathing hard and the neck and underarms of his shirts were drenched with sweat.

"Did it work?" he heard Emmagan say, her voice urgent and strangely far away.

"All three ships have been destroyed," McKay confirmed, and John exhaled before he hauled himself out of the chair with arms that were oddly shaky.

McKay grabbed him by the upper arm to help him; John's head swam for just a moment, and he gratefully accepted the powerbar McKay produced from a pocket of his tac vest. "Takes more out of you than you'd think," he said around a mouthful of food, not quite able to look McKay in the eye—still a little too raw from the control chair; still a little too conscious of how he'd leaned into McKay's touch.

"Good job, sir," Cadman said, snapping the gum in her mouth.

"That was very well done, Mr Sheppard," Emmagan said. Her eyebrows quirked upwards, and her face glowed with the force of her smile.

"You're welcome," John said, feeling a little better now that his pulse was starting to slow. He rubbed at the nape of his neck with one hand. "That was kind of a rush," he admitted.

"And you wanted to stay in Vegas," McKay said. His t-shirt had come half-untucked from his BDU pants, and his hair made him look like he'd been electrified, but his hands were stuck in his pockets and he sounded even more obnoxiously smug than usual. John—John wanted to touch him, to rest his head on McKay's shoulder and smell his sweat and let McKay feel how his heart was thundering in his chest.

_Zelenka to McKay_, the comms crackled before John had time to respond. _Sensors are detecting a single Asuran life form out on the north pier—it must have beamed down before the ships were destroyed. Is moving towards gate room—_

The lights flickered and died again, leaving the room in pitch blackness for a moment before the Ancient version of emergency lighting came on—a blue-tinged glow that made everyone look sickly and unreal.

"Can't think why I wanted to stay in Vegas," John said, and picked his rifle back up from where he had left it on the floor.

"Shut up," McKay said.

***

It was like the whole city had suddenly gone crazy—transporters didn't work, lights were out, doors opened and closed at random, and the city intercom hummed with a strange and constant static.

"What the hell is going on?" John asked. His head was still buzzing with the intangible connection to Atlantis that the chair had created, and he wasn't sure if it was simple disorientation or if he was still able to sense the city spiralling out of control. By unspoken consensus, they were headed towards the north pier, hurrying at double time along the gently curving corridor with Emmagan—Teyla—and Cadman taking point. A couple hundred yards behind them, Ford, Dex and a squadron of Marines were following them.

"It's possible for Replicators to upload their consciousness to Ancient-based tech and cause interference with basic operating systems," McKay said, his words coming harsh with the effort of running.

"That happened before?"

"Yes," McKay answered. They clattered down a set of steps and pushed out through stubbornly closing doors onto the broad sweep of the outdoor pier. The crosswind wasn't strong but it was insistent, and John had to bow his head as they ran into it. Out here, they could see the damage caused by the Asuran weapons much more easily—great blackened gouges in the body of the pier, shattered windows and twisted metal—and more than once they had to swerve around impact sites that were still too hot to touch.

"You think you'll be able to get them out this time?"

"Please," McKay said. He had one hand pressed to his side, but he was still running. "That was how we caught her the last time. No way is Elizabeth dumb enough to try that again."

"She's doing this from outside the city's systems?" John could feel both his eyebrows shoot up.

"Elizabeth was always smart," McKay said.

Then, "Rodney!" Teyla said from ahead of them, and pointed. There was a lone figure on one knee not far from the end of the pier, hand pressed flat against the dull grey metal. Elizabeth, John realised—her head bowed so that all John could really make out of her was the black and red leather of her clothing and her hair tossing in the wind.

They slowed their pace, letting Ford and Ronon catch up with them just as they came to a halt not far from Elizabeth. John could hear the faint whine of everyone's weapons powering on. "So, uh… what's the plan, doc?" Ford said out of the side of his mouth, in what John was pretty sure Ford thought was a subtle manner.

"Still working on it," McKay hissed back.

Elizabeth's head came up. "Rodney, Captain," she said. "What a surprise." John didn't know the woman well enough to know what her tells were—what they had been, when she was still human—but there were fine lines of tension around her mouth, a strain visible in the way she held her neck. He also knew enough to be fairly certain that what she was doing wasn't normal. Her hand where it touched the pier was… wrong, the edges of her skin blurring and moving as if trying to pull itself apart. John could hear, from the soft noise of distress that Teyla made, that she had noticed it too.

The scent of salt-water was sharp in John's nose, and he tried to calculate angle and trajectory and timing. Maybe he could get a shot off while Elizabeth's attention was distracted by McKay and Ford, by how Dex had a rifle aimed unerringly between her eyes—something about the way McKay was standing, though, told him to hold off.

"You're not going to be able to get back into the city," McKay said, and John knew all the shades of McKay's bluster by now, but there was no bluff here that he could sense—McKay sounded as sincere as he ever had at that first meeting of theirs back on Earth. "You honestly think we didn't learn how to close off that back door after last time?"

"Did you think I wouldn't learn some new tricks?" The disintegration of Elizabeth's hand was getting worse. It was hard to tell now where she ended and the pier began; it made John feel a little nauseated just to look at it. It was like watching a person fade away, right in front of him—and under his feet, the pier was beginning to vibrate just a little.

He glanced over at Ford—by the look on Ford's face, he could feel those fine tremors too, and either the damage the Asuran ships had done was bad enough to have damaged the structure of the city or whatever Elizabeth was doing was having an impact on the city.

"We cannot let you do this, Elizabeth," Teyla said. She was standing still as a statue, the wind whipping the blue column of her dress around her legs, except for a single hand that she had extended slightly towards Elizabeth. "You know that. But we can work with—"

Elizabeth shook her head. "I trusted you last time. That won't happen again."

Dex's control broke at that. "Don't you dare take on her face and talk to us about trust." John didn't know what had happened before, didn't know what had taken them out here to the edge of the ocean under a grey sky, but he could only imagine the kind of pain it would take to make Dex's voice crack like that.

Elizabeth looked at him for a long moment, but didn't reply. She looked back at McKay instead; her hand had vanished into the pier's structure almost to the wrist, and the trembling beneath John's feet had grown strong enough that he was swaying from side to side. "You have two choices, Rodney. Let me into Atlantis, or let me go home."

"You're not going to get in, and we can't let you go back to Earth," McKay said simply.

"You trapped me like this!" Elizabeth snapped; she didn't yell, but the voice that was carried to John over the ocean breeze was full of anguish nonetheless.

"I know," McKay said. He looked as pale as John had ever seen him. "And I am so sorry. But I can't give you the city, and I can't let a Replicator loose on Earth."

"Then it's fortunate that I'm able to do this for myself," Elizabeth said. She plunged both hands into the pier, and for a moment, the tremor in the ground grew bad enough that Ford was thrown to his knees and John staggered and curse. Glass shattered out of the windows on the levels below them, a recursive boom that John remembered only too well from his time in the Middle East, amber and green-coloured shards arcing out over the sea. Something deep inside the pier's structure groaned, metal stressed past bearing, and John heard McKay yell something.

Cadman and Teyla both had their guns aimed at Elizabeth, red tracers focused on her forehead, but before they could shoot, Elizabeth tossed her head back and cried out and the tremors stopped.

"What did you do?" she said, and the timbre of her voice had changed—turned metallic and hollow, distorted as if it were coming from a long way away. "Rodney?" Elizabeth pulled her hands up and away from the pier. For a moment they seemed to reform, becoming slender, elegant fingers once more; but then they started to crumble again, and from the look of outrage on Elizabeth's face, John didn't think that was on purpose.

"Oh, come on, Elizabeth," McKay said. His chin was tilted up, and he looked just like he had when he and John had faced off across a table from one another back in Vegas. "You think I didn't know you were going to try this again? Of course I put in a booby trap."

"My _head_," Elizabeth gasped. Her skin was grey-tinged now, dissolving hands coming up to clutch at her forehead. "What—"

McKay hunkered down in front of her. Teyla took a step forward, John presumed to pull him back, but a touch of Ronon's hand on her shoulder stopped her.

"It's a virus," McKay said, voice matter-of-fact. His fingers were laced together, his arms resting with deliberate ease on his knees. "A computer code, triggered by proximity to Ancient technology. It's breaking down the bonds that exist between your nanites. Get too close to Ancient tech, try to integrate with it, and the virus is triggered."

"It… hurts." Her voice was distorted now, sluggish, like a clockwork toy whose energy was running out.

"It's self-protection," McKay said, and John saw Dex look away from the gentleness in McKay's voice, the look of betrayal in Elizabeth's face. "You should have expected it."

Elizabeth looked at him for a moment longer, and then her face changed—a complete blank, calm and cold and set—and she fell apart. John's mind couldn't quite make sense of it, of how the woman who'd been kneeling there turned into a spilling cascade of tiny metal blocks. Robots, thousands of them, none of them bigger than his thumbnail, and all of them scurrying away up along the pier, a gunmetal cloud that swarmed up one of the external towers and vanished inside.

"Shit!" Cadman exclaimed. "Where is she—"

"Should go after her," Dex said.

McKay shook his head. "It's okay, I know where she's going."

John cocked an eyebrow at him. "Mind sharing with the class, Dr McKay?"

McKay jammed his hands in his pockets, staring at the point high up in the central control tower where the gate room was. "She's headed for the stargate. She can't be around Ancient tech if she wants her keron pathways to stabilise, and there's not a square centimetre of Atlantis that isn't wired. She's going to get off world as fast as she can."

A crease appeared between Teyla's eyebrows. "How will she be able to dial the stargate? Surely the dialling computer is protected by extra layers of security."

McKay nodded and rocked back on his heels. "Yeah, but she's desperate. She's going to think she found a way to sneak out. Zelenka and I really did prepare for every contingency."

Dex pushed past them all and started walking back up the pier. The set of his shoulders was painful to watch. Ford raised his eyebrows at John. Probably would be best if Dex wasn't alone right now. John nodded, and Ford set off after Dex, jogging slightly in an attempt to keep up with Dex's loping strides.

"She's able to dig into the system just deep enough to dial the gate," McKay continued. "But that's going to trigger a hidden sub-routine. No matter what address she dials, the gate will connect to M5X-458."

Cadman's jaw dropped. "Isn't their gate an orbital one, McKay?"

McKay turned and stared at her, but didn't say a thing.

"_Rodney_," Teyla said, sounding shocked, but no one said anything at all when McKay tapped at his comm unit and said, "Mitchell's confirmed it. She went through the gate. She's gone."

***

John went back to his quarters after promising to debrief Woolsey in the morning and a quick check-over with Keller. He showered, and brushed his teeth, and shaved, and even though he was exhausted he still felt too wired to sleep. He pulled on a clean pair of jeans and a not-too-grubby t-shirt, paced from one end of his bedroom to another a few times, then sat on his couch and tried to watch the DVD of the Boston-Miami game that McKay had given him all those months ago. All the long muscles in John's arms and legs twitched with exertion and the after-effects of adrenaline, and he wished like hell he had a beer.

He considered getting up and seeing if he could liberate a Bud or two from the walk-in fridge in the mess hall, thought maybe of going and finding a punching bag in the gym and beating the hell out of it for an hour or two, but then the door to his quarters chimed and opened and there was McKay—Rodney—looking as if he hadn't slept for a week, his eyes red-rimmed and his jaw edged with stubble.

"Hey," John said, "you okay?"

"No," Rodney said. "Yes. You—" And then he was across the room, dropping to his knees on the floor in front of the couch.

"What are you—" John's voice had turned suddenly hoarse, and he could feel his eyes go wide.

"Oh hush," Rodney said. "If you—don't pretend this is a surprise, because right now, I can't, I can't anymore…"

"Okay," John said, "it's okay," and shuddered when Rodney ran the flats of his palms the full length of John's jean-clad thighs; shivered when Rodney leaned up and pressed his mouth to John's. The kiss was slow at first, careful, but with a faint echo of all the things that John had never thought he'd find again—a kind of certainty that went marrow-deep, speaking of comfort and constancy. Rodney's mouth opened to his, and John felt something unclench behind his rib cage, the sudden absence of a fear that he'd been trying to ignore for way too long. John nipped at the curve of Rodney's lower lip, grinned at the moan that got him, low in Rodney's throat, and then soothed the sting of the bite with a swipe of his tongue.

He reached up with one hand to cup the nape of Rodney's neck, feeling the short hairs there prickle against his fingertips, and tugged Rodney closer to his mouth. Rodney went willingly, tongue pushing into John's mouth with something close to greed and fingers already starting to pull at the hem of John's t-shirt.

"Is this—is that okay?" Rodney asked. "Can I—"

"Yes," John said, "God," trying to keep kissing Rodney even while hauling him up onto the couch. Rodney heaved himself up and straddled John's lap, letting John kiss him hard and deep while Rodney ran his hands up under John's shirt. He scraped blunt nails against the grain of the hairs on John's belly, up along his sides, and John found himself breaking away from the kiss, already wide-eyed and gasping for breath.

"Please," he said, tugging at Rodney's own shirt in turn. If Rodney was going to touch him like that, make him desperate like this, then he needed skin against skin, needed to see if Rodney would be like he'd been picturing him for weeks—to see if his skin would flush wherever John touched him, to see if Rodney would moan when John grazed Rodney's nipples with his teeth.

"Touch you," Rodney said, and John didn't know if that was a wish or a declaration of intent, but regardless he went obediently as Rodney choreographed the removal of their clothing. John caught an elbow to the belly and Rodney stood on his own big toe but then they were both tumbling down onto John's neatly made bed and none of that mattered—John was lying on his back with Rodney a warm weight on top of him, his erection an insistent pressure against John's thigh.

"What do you want?" Rodney mumbled between kisses. "John—" His hips were already working against John's, slow thrusts of friction and pressure that were making things short-circuit in John's brain.

"I—" John swallowed with a throat that was suddenly dry. He wanted all sorts of things, mind flicking through a series of technicolour images that made his back arch involuntarily: he wanted to know what it would feel like to have that mouth of Rodney's wrapped around his cock, wanted to know what it would be like to spread his legs and let Rodney fuck him, wanted to kiss Rodney and hump his leg until he came from that alone. "Just—your hand," he said, and moved Rodney's hand down so that his long, blunt-tipped fingers curled around John's erection. "Slowly."

"Okay," Rodney said. "Okay, that—I can do that."

And he could—his hand working John with deft surety until John shuddered and gasped and came against Rodney's belly. Orgasm felt like more than release this time—it felt like relief, his skin raw and remade by the touch of Rodney's hand, heat more intense than the Nevada desert coiling around his spine. Pleasure made his limbs lazy, his eyes heavy-lidded, but he recovered enough to kiss Rodney when he himself came.

"John," Rodney mumbled afterwards, pressing kisses to John's temple, running one hand the length of his side, up to scratch at his scalp and rub his hair against the grain. It felt good, and John pushed up blindly into Rodney's touch, eyes closed and wondering if he could ever have guessed it would be like this.

"Mmhmm," John said, tugging the blankets up over them and inching his way over so that his head rested on Rodney's shoulder, so that belly was pressed against belly. It'd been a while since John had had sex, longer since he'd let himself rest like this. It felt nice.

He dozed for a while, drifted, came back to awareness when he heard Rodney whisper, "She was my friend."

"'s'okay, buddy," John murmured back. "'s'okay. It will be okay." And John had left people behind, had friends die on him, knew what blood-soaked sand looked like on more than one continent—he knew it might never be alright, but it might be okay.

***

John dreamed while he slept: he dreamed he was flying, cutting a wide arc over Atlantis beneath Afghanistan's skies. The sky curved clean and blue above him; below him, the city was home mapped out in a geometry of sun-shining towers and sweeping curves. His hands were covered with gun calluses; they had been scoured clean by sand. The ocean air was sharp enough to make his lungs burn, and John breathed in, breathed in, flipped and dived and soared until he couldn't make out where Atlantis ended and the horizon began, not anymore.

***

Woolsey raised his voice quite substantially during the debriefing.

Rodney turned an interesting shade of puce, then white, and then he yelled a lot.

Zelenka said stuff in Czech that John just knew couldn't be all that polite.

John mostly slouched in his chair and exchanged grins with Ford and Mitchell when they thought no one was watching, and drank a lot of coffee.

***

John had planned to spend the afternoon in the labs. Or at least, Zelenka and Simpson had been working on a joint project—something to do with the first step to maybe recharging a ZPM's fuel cells—and John had been told that it was apparently very necessary that John go sit quietly with them and touch what he was told to touch, without wriggling in his seat or making any snide comments about how he was the Energiser Bunny of Atlantis.

Rodney sprung him while Zelenka and Simpson had their backs turned and were arguing about… well, John wasn't quite sure, but he'd bet money that it was something that John had done. Rodney appeared at the door of the labs and jerked his head in the direction of the corridor in a way that John thought was supposed to come across as suave, but clearly wasn't.

John hadn't quite managed the trick of tip-toeing silently somewhere while wearing boots, but Simpson was saying "No, no, no!" quite loudly while rubbing out some of Zelenka's equations on the whiteboard, so he had some cover.

"Where we going?" he asked Rodney once they'd cleared the danger zone, and were heading in a wide loop around the gate room and up the access stairs that led to the highest levels of the tower.

"Well," Rodney said, keying open a large blast door. "I realised this morning that I had been kind of remiss in not taking you up in one of the gate ships—or well, more to the point, in letting _you_ take up one of the gate ships, since my many talents don't quite yet encompass getting one of these things to go in a straight—anyway. You're a pilot. In all the places I've known you, this is what you do."

John peered around the room. He'd seen a couple of these ships on manoeuvres around the city once—little blocky things that were improbably graceful, incredibly fast—but he didn't think they were taken out often. Not enough people with the gene, Mitchell had told him once, but as John walked up the ramp into one and felt it light up around him, he couldn't understand why anyone with the gene wouldn't want to fly one of these as often as possible.

He sat down in the pilot's chair, put his hand on what he felt to be the control console, and felt the ship open up to him. So many possibilities, and— "Huh. Hey, Rodney. You know these things can travel underwater?"

"I— what? They cannot. They—show me that," Rodney said, sitting down next to him, hands pushy and insistent. He zoomed in on something on the holographic scene and whistled, "Son of a bitch," low and reverent.

"Just what else can you do?" Rodney asked, looking over at John from the corner of his eye. The tips of his ears were a little pink; his knee was pressed tight against John's thigh, and John didn't feel the least inclination to move away.

John smirked and settled back in his seat. "Guess you're going to have to take me up and find out."


End file.
